Buffalo (E-Mail) Soldier

Had to put this aside for a few days for other stories, but a few others in the blogosphere jumped on it. If you haven’t caught it on other sites yet: The man behind a new anti-Spitzer e-mail campaign is a Starbucks manager and aspiring Republican politician from Buffalo.

Sergio Rodriguez, who identified himself as chairman of the Walter J. Mahoney Republican
Club, said he has nothing to do with now-ousted Senate Republican operative Roger Stone, although he heard him speak at a Republican convention once.

Rodriguez also said he doesn’t know Michael Caputo, a political operative who works from
Florida and Buffalo who recently undertook a similar effort, via e-mail and a Web site, to
attack Spitzer in the Troopergate affair.

Nor has he been in contact with Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, he said, although he is on the senate leader’s mailing list.

Rodriguez’s e-mails faulted Spitzer on upstate economic development. They began coming to reporters earlier this month. A check of the group’s Web site showed it was registered Aug. 14 using Domains by Proxy, a service that shields the identity of people who create Web sites. Caputo also used the service.

A few days after I sent a reply e-mail to the Mahoney address, Rodriguez wrote back to say he’s the chairman of the group.

Rodriguez is running for the Buffalo Common Council’s Niagara District – the only
Republican running for city office there this year, according to a recent Buffalo news story.
The 27-year-old former former Marine said he’s long been active in the Erie County
Republican Party and has been involved in campaigns going back to former Gov. George Pataki.

“A number of us did not think the Republican State Committee is doing much about promoting the republican (sic) agenda,” he wrote, so they formed the Walter J. Mahoney Republican Club, named for a former state senator.

Rodriguez said he got e-mail addresses by renting “some Conservative email lists and a
friend with the Giuliani campaign gave me their press email lists.”

That may not be all there is to it, though.

Others looking into the connection between the e-mail campaigns and Stone found some oddities. Phillip Anderson of The Albany Project, for instance,Â signed up for Stone’s “Stone Zone” on Aug. 16. Four days later, he got an e-mail from Spitzerfile.com, which Caputo runs along with NYFacts.com. And Daily Gotham reports that the Caputo/Stone e-mail list appears to have come from an e-mail sent out by Ben Smith, the former Daily Politics blogger who went on to Politico. The e-mail didn’t hide the addresses of the recipients, and Smith told DG that Stone was indeed on his list.